My War Gone By, I Miss IT So

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A testament to his honor and courage. And while it would be impossible for one man to tell the whole story, his book shines with small truths and larger, philosophical ones about life and war." -- New York Post his druggy crowd of friends in West London might have volunteered to go fight fascism in Spain. Loyd, unencumbered by political convictions, went to Bosnia to save himself from himself. Also, to get the full draft of war Guerra e roba. Spero sempre che l’una o l’altra mi mostrino la strada, ma non si verifica mai. Pensi di aver toccato il fondo molte volte e invece scopri sempre qualcos’altro da perdere. E dopo un po’ ti accorgi che quello che un tempo ti sembrava il fondo è ora un’altitudine verso la quale stai arrancando. of his neighbors (why else, after all, is he there?), he finds himself unable to photograph her. Within a few months, though, having inherited a wounded correspondent's job, Loyd is recording the carnage around him

Loyd married Lady Sophia Hamilton, daughter of James Hamilton, 5th Duke of Abercorn in 2002 at Baronscourt, the Duke's 5,500 acre (22km²) ancestral estate, near Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. [6] They were divorced in 2005, on an amicable basis, occasioned by Loyd's frequent absences reporting on wars. He remarried again in 2007 and is now based in Devon with his wife, daughter and stepdaughter. [7] [8] at or near the front. Readers are submerged in a grim cycle of boredom, discomfort, chaos, terror and grief -- a cycle that in his version becomes so all-consuming that the peacetime world recedes, seeming to disappear You could have a good time in Stara Bila that summer, providing you had not been born in the place. Congregated there were every type and nationality of journalist, photographer, cameraman (...). The fighting spilled further into the hills around us; they glowed with burning villages at night, and echoed with firefights by day. We sometimes watched it over barbecues. At dusk, we would choose our company, load up on whatever was going, and party to excess. We would fade out what the war meant to us and turn up the volume on the generator-run sound system."As with heroin, Loyd becomes addicted to war; the rush of combat, the thrill of cheating death, the clear-headed conviction of doing something that matters. In some ways it’s relatable and inspiring. In others, it’s insane, selfish, and exploitative. The hypocrisy of his actions is not lost on Loyd, and reading him grapple with it is illuminating, especially as it pertains to the modern media. Riveting, first-hand, intensely personal accounts of horror . . . by turns looking at the convexity of war in Bosnia and the concavity of the war going on inside the author, as he wrestles with questions as mundane as addiction and as exalted as theology." -- San Jose Mercury News This is merely one example of the horrific cruelty and irrational hatreds created by the conflict between a desire to have an ethnically pure nationalistic country and those who desired a secular multi-ethnic society. Of course, nothing can be that simple, and one wonders if the thugs hadn’t taken control. Horrors abound as humans are turned into weapons. Loyd witnessed one particularly wanton and cruel act as groups of Serbian soldiers bound the arms of some Croatian prisoners and then taped Claymore mines to their bodies connected by wires to their own lines. They forced the prisoners to walk toward the enemy lines, assuming the prisoners would not be fired upon. The inevitable end left only minor pieces scattered around and parts of legs.

The Bosnian War was over the breakup of Yugoslavia and lasted from 1992-1995. Three armies were formed along ethnic/religious grounds: the Army of Republika Srpska(VRS) or Serbs/Protestants on the one side, and the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina (ARBiH) which was largely composed of Bosniaks/Muslims, and the Croat/Catholic forces in the Croatian Defence Council (HVO) on the other side. Loyd came there thinking he had the most sympathy for the Muslim side, but as he finds in war when one side commits an atrocity and then the other side responds with something equally horrendous it is hard to know which side is more morally right. ”You could take sides in Bosnia easily enough if you wished, but it never allowed you complete peace of mind.”Ma trovo che la vera pornografia sia tradurre il titolo originale ‘My War Gone, I Miss It So’ in Apocalisse criminale. First of all, this book is hugely informative. It sheds light on a historical and human tragedy whose details are still largely unknown, no matter how massive the media coverage was at the time; and it does so from a perspective I can't quite define, between smugly egotistic and rationally detached. In short, a unique voice in the chorus of talk-show mourners and fundraising hyenas we're so familiar with nowadays. I've read enough of these books that they begin to blur together, but this joins Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War by Peter Maass, and Endgame: The Betrayal And Fall Of Srebrenica, Europe's Worst Massacre Since World War II by David Rohde, as one of the books that will stay with me and haunt me. The writing here is better than those, but the book itself is less focused.

Loyd gradually acquired a political view of the war: Serbian nationalists were the main aggressors, Muslims the main victims. ''Gone was my wandering impartiality,'' he writes. ''I was for air strikes, for NATO intervention, heroin addiction. This is where ''My War Gone By, I Miss It So'' gets into real trouble, floundering frequently into incoherence, into posturing both maudlin and macho, into dismal swamps of stoned mixed Why would someone voluntarily place himself in a situation that is known to put life and sanity at great risk? As Loyd relates, Usually I expect to be choked up while reading war memoirs. That didn't happen often with Anthony Loyd's My War Gone By, the most gruesome account I have ever read of warfare, despite my prejudice, shared with the author, for the Bosnian side of the conflicts between the former republics of Yugoslavia.

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The prospect of peace eventually becomes, to Loyd's mind, ''hideous.'' His self-loathing entwines with his growing contempt for peaceful, prosperous places, and he scorns ''the complacency of Western societies.'' The cruelty and chaos of the conflict both appalled and embraced him; the adrenalin lure of the action perhaps the loudest siren call of all. In the midst of the daily life-and-death struggle among Bosnia’s Serbs, Croats and Muslims, he was inspired by the extraordinary human fortitude he discovered. But returning home he found the void of peacetime too painful to bear, and so began a longstanding personal battle with drug abuse. been left in a shed next to three murdered women. The women kneel, sightlessly watching the journalists struggle, in a shallow pit in the floor. In the classic war movie, Akira Kurosawa's Ran, there is a scene in which all has been lost. A small group of soldiers lament in a devastated landscape, one crying out that he curses the gods for allowing such horror to occur. Another soldier says, "Do not blaspheme! The gods look down on us and weep for what we do to ourselves." This is definitely not a book for everybody, but it did satisfy my goal of filling a hole in my historical knowledge, one I’m sure many others have. The lessons learned are important, though sadly not unique. That this happened in my lifetime is sobering evidence that it can easily happen again. Hopefully, with more books like this, that chance will diminish.